Was it always this way? The association of skin color and race is a surprisingly modern development. Colonialism and early science shaped the way Americans understood skin color, creating a new definition of race — one that persists today

Join us to learn how earlier generations understood race, how scientists contributed to changing the meanings attached to race and whether history suggests we can change how we think about race.

About the presenter: Karen Leroux teaches US history, specializing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her courses tend to explore how gender, race and class shaped and were shaped by developments in the past. She also teaches the modern world history sequence at Drake.

Leroux earned a B.A. at Northwestern University, a M.A. at the University of British Columbia, and a Ph.D. at Northwestern University. She has been at Drake since 2005 and was honored with the Arts & Sciences Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in 2009.

Leroux was born in Canada, and spent every nearly summer of her childhood on her grandparents’ dairy farm in Nova Scotia, but she has lived most of her life in U.S. cities. As a young adult, she moved around the U.S. and Canada and enjoyed a couple of years working in Australia. Since then, she has gravitated to the Midwest, making her home in the Chicago area and now Des Moines. She still travels frequently, does yoga regularly and spends whatever time she has left trying to fix up a 1900-era house.